Great ShakeOut goes on despite pandemic
LANCASTER — The international Great ShakeOut Earthquake Drill went on as scheduled Thursday despite the global COVID-19 pandemic.
The annual drill, held each year on the third Thursday of October, is designed for local governments, school districts, businesses, and even individuals and families to be prepared to survive and recover quickly from a big earthquake.
The drill typically involves tens of thousand of students of all ages learning how to drop and cover. This year’s drill looked different with campus closures due to the pandemic and students engaged in distance learning.
“This year we didn’t do a districtwide
drill,” Jenny Sampson, Lancaster School District’s coordinator of Climate, School Safety and Emergency Management.
Teachers could do a drill with their children if they chose, but it was not mandatory.
“I really didn’t want to put a whole lot more on teachers,” Sampson said.
Most of the district’s synchronous morning sessions are done by 10 a.m. That’s about 15 minutes before the make-believe earthquake hit.
Sampson pushed out optional self-paced video lessons about different types of disasters and what it’s like to be a firefighter that students could do via asynchronous learning.
“I think it was fun and a couple of teachers might have pushed that out,” Sampson said.
The videos were geared toward kindergarten through second grade, third through fifth-grade, and sixththrough eighth grade students.
Antelope Valley College campuses are also closed with students engaged in remote learning save for critical workforce disciplines.
At 10:15 a.m. — the time of the make-believe earthquake — an emergency alert flashed on employees’ computers from the emergency alert system with an all-caps “ALERT!” In red letters, followed one minute later by a voluntary drill drop/cover/hold-on drill. A second alert followed with a mandatory building evacuation drill that required employees to wear face masks and observe social distancing rules throughout the drill. Employees filed out of buildings to a designated area.
AV College’s director of Risk Management Terry Cleveland, who also serves as safety officer/OSHA in the college’s Emergency Operations Center, deemed the drill a success.
“We’ve been sending out earthquake safety tips for people to use at home and in their daily lives wherever they happen to be as well as at the college,” Cleveland said.
Cleveland worked with AV College geology professor Aurora Burd, an earthquake expert, to prepare for Thursday’s drill.
“Aurora and I have been talking about this since last year when we did it on more of a voluntary basis at the college,” Cleveland said. “This year we kind of formalized it a little bit more.”
Thursday’s drill included the drop, stop and hold-on drill for one minute followed by an evacuation, as though they wanted everyone to exit buildings before an aftershock hit and brought things down on people.
“It was actually a real success today,” Cleveland said. “This was the first time that we’ve held a drill where we evacuated the entire campus. We felt pretty comfortable that we could do that because there are so few people on campus compared to a normal, pre-COVID day.”
The pandemic also impacted how local governments conducted their drill. The City of Palmdale went all out for the 2019 Great ShakeOut with its Emergency Operations Center in full effect as employees responded to numerous scenarios across the city. This year the a video was sent out to city employees at 10:15 a.m.
“We did the drop, cover, hold,” Communications Manager John Mlynar said. “A lot of places probably weren’t doing them because some places, people working from home, so they’re not doing them. We just chose to do ours just at our desks.”